I saw The End of the Tour yesterday, a film about the author David Foster Wallace. Wallace's most famous work was the novel "Infinite Jest", published in 1996.

He also famously killed himself in 2008.

The film is a retrospective of an interview of Wallace for Rolling Stone by writer David Lipsky. (Lipsky's article went unpublished until 2009, after Wallace died. In 2010 Lipsky won a National Magazine Award (think Pulitzer-Prize-for-magazines) for his work.) 95% of the film is retelling, mostly word-for-word (most of the screenplay is sourced from tapes Lipsky recorded, so the actual dialogue is often verbatim), the story of their five or six days together in 1996 as Wallace was finishing his book tour for "Infinite Jest".

It's hard to describe what this film is about in more detail than that. The subject matter goes all over the place. Wallace and Lipsky talked about all sorts of things: television (Wallace's "addiction"), dogs, fame, women (Alanis Morissette in particular), alcoholism, being a writer, and suicide. This isn't a dramatization of their time together, just a very faithful re-enactment. In a way it's a movie about nothing, and in another way it's a movie about everything.

I enjoyed it very much; it's easily one of the best films I've seen in recent memory.

'One of (Lucas) Cranach's masterpieces, discussed by (Joseph) Koerner, is in it's self-referentiality the perfect expression of left-hemisphere emptiness and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself.' - Iain McGilChrist

Suppose a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?"
"Suppose it didn't," said Pooh, after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.
- A.A. Milne.